


I’ll Play the Part (And I Won’t Need Rehearsing)

by firstbreaths



Category: Glee
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-02
Updated: 2013-10-02
Packaged: 2017-12-28 05:16:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/988129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstbreaths/pseuds/firstbreaths
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A conversation between Blaine and Tina, and a realisation. [coda for 5x01]</p>
            </blockquote>





	I’ll Play the Part (And I Won’t Need Rehearsing)

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of the stuff around Blaine’s actions in 5x01 didn’t really make sense to me, and the Tina stuff just made me want to cry, so here, have my thoughts in a fic, I guess. Jumping back on the fic bandwagon after a long time not writing, so go me, I guess!

It’s late on a Tuesday afternoon when Blaine and Tina enter the Lima Bean, fingers interlocked and arms swinging as Tina retells the story of the  Macbeth  reenactment in her English class and, “there’s a reason  why  that play’s a forbidden name in some circles, Blaine, Stoner Brett got  way  too into that scene.”

[[MORE]]“Stones and glass houses, Tina,” Blaine reminds her gently as they step up to the counter, “we come from a glee club that almost destroyed the choir room trying to parody  Wrecking Ball,  and besides after this week, I’m certainly not one to talk”.

He takes a step back to survey the muffin varieties, breathes in the smell of roasting coffee beans, and cinnamon sugar and that weird old homeless guy with the peg-leg, and glances around - the table where he and Kurt first said  _I love you,_ the table where they first talked about the future,  _married by 30 (legally)_ and so many memories that he wanted to put into his speech but hoped the song would convey. Some days, it feels like the entirety of Lima swells with memories of their relationship, kisses and fights and nights spent stargazing lapping the shores of McKinley and Dalton, Lima and New York like a wave he can’t quite fight. 

“Your usual, Blaine?” he hears Tina asks, and he snaps his head up straight and turns to face her, reaching for his wallet in the process. “My shout - I still owe you for those cookies last week.”

“You’re fantastic,” Blaine replies, smiling warmly, and they wait for their coffees in silence before heading to their usual table, overlooking the carpark and the cute boy that works in the music store across the street. Today, he doesn’t even glance over there. “But I’m also fairly sure that you smuggled me a few cans of Red Bull yesterday when I was about to die in calculus. I must remember to email Cooper and tell him not to do any more ads for energy drink companies before someone dies as a result of his ridiculous accent promoting an overdose on caffeine."  


He looks directly at Tina, tapping his fingers against the table as he talks. It’s warm in the Lima Bean, and he can feel the beginnings of summer settling against his skin, an itch he can’t quite scratch. Graduation, and summer, in Lima and then New York, and the beginning of the rest of his life. “Fess up, what’s this really about?” he asks, a little unsure. 

“You know me too well, Blaine Anderson, which is why you’re my favourite” Tina replies, but her smile is tempered by the way she raises her eyebrows, the way he hears her foot plant hard on the floor next to his. “Which is why I feel as though it should be perfectly okay for me to raise my concerns with you about what happened the other day.” She takes a long, drawn-out sip of coffee, watching him intently over the top of her cup.

Oh god, she’s not  _still_ mad about that, is she? “The rose petals, they were too much, weren’t they? I just thought, the gardener at Dalton and I used to get along so well, and - Besides, I’m fairly sure Trent stole a bunch to serenade our old calculus teacher with.” 

“He learned from the best, I see,” Tina says, and Blaine glances up from his cup to smile at her, just as she says, “This isn’t about the rose petals, Blaine. Or the fact that no one ever warned me that having your friends try to help you would  hurt ,” and she’s frowning and her voice is sharp and piercing like a missed note, jarring Blaine right to the bones.

Sitting in front of him, she seems to have shrunken slightly, wearing her anger like a too-small coat she needs to shrug her shoulders into, and he wonders what the world did to make her so bitter, so young. (From his own personal experience with fucking things up, he also secretly wonders if it was  _really_ all Mike Chang’s fault). 

Blaine forces himself to meet her eyes. 

“I can’t believe you sung to me Blaine. It was disrespectful and awful and the only reason I’m yelling at you here instead of in the choir room is because I can’t stand seeing Unique and Marley make those faces at me. I’m lonely, I’m not some three legged freak at the fair who needs their pity. Or yours, for that matter.”

“I was just trying to help,” Blaine says, even though he’s learnt himself well enough over the last year to know she’s right, all of his faults catalogued and analysed like a museum piece,  _you can’t change the past_ but damn if he wasn’t going to try and make his future better. He knows that he can be too quick to jump to conclusions, too quick to play both the wounded but also the saviour that New Directions doesn’t always need, but somewhere along the line he’s pulled all the worst parts of himself from the shelf, turned them over and dusted them off, ready to become the centrepiece of a new exhibition. 

He just wishes Tina could see that she’s just as worthy of being admired, both by herself and by others. There’s a reason they’ve grown so much closer this year. 

“I just - we just wanted you to know that it gets better,” Blaine says, reaching out and taking her hand on top of the table. He feels her tense up beneath his fingers, but she doesn’t pull away. “That it might not seem like it, sometimes, but there are people who love you, people who care about you. I don’t know how I would have made it through his year without you, and now we’re only a few weeks from getting to go to Nationals again, from graduating.”

He takes a hurried sip of his coffee, spluttering as the hot liquid hits the back of his throat. Tina snorts, ever so softly, and it’s a welcome distraction he knows neither of them will admit they needed. One of the things he’s learning his year is that friendship, love - they’re overwhelming, in both the best and worst possible ways. 

“So you thought you’d remind me of that by offering Ryder and Sam up as my prom dates,” Tina says, eyes narrowing, and she slides her hand out from underneath his. “Like I couldn’t find someone on my own, like I’m too pathetic to be able to convince someone to go with me. Let me tell you, Blaine Anderson,” and he snatches his own hand back off the table, cradles his coffee cup protectively, “if I had a piece of that cake right now, I’d be throwing it in your face.” Around the Lima Bean, a few customers raise their heads, before going back to their conversations and their newspapers. Blaine’s been involved in enough arguments and singalongs in here that he suspects they’re just used to it by now.

“Let’s not do that,” Blaine protests, because it really  _is_ good cake. “Look, I’m - I’m sorry, okay, you looked so upset and lonely, and I know I’ve been kind of distracted lately, but I was just trying to -”

“Help?” Tina says, and there’s a hint of a laugh somewhere there, in the way she shrugs her shoulders a little too quickly, trying to contain it. “As your friend I feel like I should be defending that performance, but you’re honestly lucky that Jesse St James wasn’t there to tell you that you lacked Paul McCartney’s ability to gracefully roll under that door.

Blaine frowns, because it wasn’t exactly his fault that the doors were locked, and he’d achieved what he wanted in the end, right? He and Kurt were  engaged , after all, and that made his heartstrings thrum to a tune more graceful than anything Jesse could ever imagine, despite what Rachel said about his impeccable knowledge of both Mozart  and  Katy Perry.

“I just wanted to make things perfect for Kurt, that’s all,” he says and, he’s been assured, it had been. “That proposal was just a small snapshot of my feelings Tina, you know that. The two of us have consumed our own body weight in Ben and Jerry’s and melancholy this year.”

“I know that, Blaine,” Tina says, and there’s that laugh again, a little sympathetic, her corners of her mouth drooping with something that feels a little like pity, and  oh.  That’s what it feels like - and it somehow hurts more than all of the New Directions screaming at him last fall  _you can be better_ or  i _t was your fault_.  Those he could deal with, he could take responsibility for them; there’s a certain kind of control that comes from being wrong, as well as from being right. “I’m just saying, you wanted to make things perfect for  Kurt , think about that. I might be destined to be Ohio’s second craziest cat lady after that women in Columbus that enrolled all of her kittens in community college, but I know how beautiful engagements should be. And I really hope you tried to make it perfect for you, too. 

“Blaine - dancing in the courtyard, the getting  way  too heavily invested in Mr. Schue’s theme of the week, caught up in the performance of it.” She sighs, long and drawn out, and Blaine wonders if they’re not both caught in their own processes of recollection and reinvention.  When you only get to sing in glee club once a month if you’re lucky, you learn to make sure you mean every single song.”

“I did, I -” and he’s really not sure what he’s justifying, just that he somehow has to justify something. “That song wasn’t a performance for you Tina, I really did mean it - even if it does turn out that teaching yourself guitar in one night isn’t the smartest thing to do when you’ve got English homework  and  a proposal to plan.”

“I know you did, Blaine,” Tina replies, and for the first time all afternoon he feels settled in his own skin. “That song, it was great. You sing like this is Disneyland and you’re captain of the dreamboat or something,” and he chuckles in spite of himself, because that sounds like the start of an insult from Santana and she’s clearly learned from the best, when she adds, “but using the Paul McCartney look to try and charm me, the fact that you somehow thought that I was incapable of resolving my own issues. Call me bitter, jaded, whatever. I’m sure Kitty’s said worse as she stabs pins into her Tina Cohen-Loser voodoo doll.”

And okay, Blaine totally needs to investigate that - he’s got a few old scarves that would make great doll clothes, for starters. 

Tina lowers her voice. “Songs don’t fix things, Blaine. I didn’t need you to be my hero, and I would have given you a rousing feminist rant if I didn’t feel like you somehow knew it all already and had just forgotten it. I can stand up for myself, okay. I would have appreciated you just being there for me when I needed it.”

The sound of the coffee grinder roars in Blaine’s ears as she leans back, and he suddenly remembers a story Artie had told him once, glances down at the table, because now, he can definitely imagine it. 

“Look, Tina,” Blaine starts off, still clutching at his coffee cup like a lifeline, because it’s all clicking into place now,  _not so self assured_ (and that’s funny really, because he’s become so much better at being reflexive about himself this year and yet somehow tangled up in his own knot of insecurities; funny how in all those years of ‘bonding’ with his dad he never learnt how to tie a rope. The life skills he needs the most, he’s had to learn alone). “I’m sorry. I just wanted to help, and clearly I went the wrong way about it. I’ll buy you an apology cheesecake, and we can sob our way through a bunch of sappy Disney movies for the third time this year. Deal?”

“Let’s just - we both made a lot of mistakes this year, okay.” Tina says, “I forgive you, babe, but just remember - I  can  cut you in half if you pull something like that again. Next time you think I have a problem, talk to me.” She punctuates her last few words by reaching out and poking him repeatedly in the shoulder until he’s pulling away with a grin, almost knocking his empty cup over in the process.   


“I don’t doubt it,” Blaine laughs, before standing up and offering Tina his hand, leading her towards the door. “If I ever need to devise an intervention to stop Trent from texting me every hour on the hour for advice about his love life, I know who to call.” He sighs. “I  knew  there was a reason I left Dalton.”

There were a lot of reasons, really, some he’s proud of and some he’s not so sure about, but he’s willing to admit that it probably wouldn’t have changed much, in the end. Tina’s point suddenly makes so, so much more sense to him and  _oh_.  (He needs to stop having realisations in the middle of the Lima Bean; combined with the coffee it can’t be good for his heart). He’s done a lot of growing, since everything that happened last fall, but sometimes it’s still difficult to plant a seed. This opportunity to build a life with Kurt, to make something grow from ashes; this is him trying to grow a garden so that he can keep out the weeds. 

Blaine just nods to himself, clasping her hand tighter. He’s a seasoned performer, knows that the second act is harder than the first because it becomes so, so much more difficult to separate the act from reality. He’s learnt the hard way this year that it’s okay to make mistakes, but the trick isn’t in fixing them, it’s in trying not to overcorrect.  _Songs don’t fix things, Blaine_ ,  and she’s right, of course, but it’s hard - music is the way he knows how to do things, his heart and lungs and thoughts in time with the staccato beat. If his body is in time with the music, then it has to be  perfect , he’s in control. There’s no room for error when you know the steps perfectly, the choreography. That plan for Tina - there’s a reason he was Paul McCartney, teen hearthrob, not Blaine Anderson (and it’s been so long since he’s been a  teenage dream ; he both loves and hearts having the pressure of that gone); it’s the only way he thought she’d accept his help. 

And that’s not the way he wants it to be with Kurt, this time. Locking things down can only lock things out. He's not going to push himself out of his own conversations with music.

The two of them stand in the doorway in silence for a moment, before Tina says softly, “The Beatles were right about a lot of things, you know -  _I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends_ , for starters, not to mention the divine wisdom that can only come from whatever ridiculous choreography Mr Schue makes us come up with for  _Yellow Submarine_ . I swear, some days I want whatever kool aid that man is drinking.”

All you need is love , that’s true, but it doesn’t mean that love is all you need. 

Marrying Kurt is just another step in the journey that is figuring out who he is and what he wants to be, and Blaine’s definitely glad that he’ll have friends like Tina to stay with him along the road. 

“Maybe next time,” he says, with a smile,  “we can choose a song to sing together.”

And with that, together, they step out into the carpark.


End file.
